INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS; With Europe's Screenless Windows, Bugs Come and Go

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

Published: August 2, 2003

PARIS, Aug. 1—
The slamming screen door is not a feature of summer life in Paris. Nor in Rome, Berlin or Madrid, for that matter.

Europeans, generally, do not use screens. As Americans cover their doors and windows to keep the bugs out, Europeans usually just whisk them away, swat them or simply endure them.

Yet here and there across the Continent screens are gaining favor. Some Europeans and Americans living abroad, frustrated at their unavailability, are making their own. At the same time, a gaggle of European companies, mostly midsize local businesses, are cashing in on the growing interest by supplying customers from Glasgow to Genoa and from Marburg to Marseille with screens to keep out mosquitoes, flies and other pesky bugs.

''The potential is immense,'' said François Del Vecchio, marketing director for Mariton, which is based in St.-Chamas-en-Provence and with $8.7 million of annual revenues is the largest maker of screens in France.

Credit some of the growth of screen use in commercial buildings to new European laws, like legislation enacted in Britain in the 1990's that mandates window and door screens wherever food is processed. And as summer heat settles over the Continent, a further boost comes, according to some in the business, from television and the movies, as Europeans see screens on buildings in American and Australian films and TV programs, and decide they might be an alternative to summer swatting.

''A lot of my customers say, 'Oh, that's like the ones we see on television,' '' said Jim Hay, 41, who manages Flyscreen UK, a company he started four years ago in a town south of Glasgow.

But Europe has a long way to go before its screen makers catch up with their counterparts in the United States.

''It's not something that we come across in this country,'' said Alan Keiller, principal engineer at the Center for Window and Cladding Technology at the University of Bath in Britain. ''I'm just speculating, but we don't have quite the problem with insects, probably because of climate conditions.''

Baruch Ben Chorin, a television producer in London, scoffs. ''I think it's a habit -- a mental and cultural thing,'' he said. When he and his wife restored a farmhouse in central Italy in recent years, they installed roll-up screens that disappear into the screen frame. In his native Israel, he said, screens are commonplace, adding, ''You certainly can use screens in parts of southern Europe.''

Domenico Minchilli, the Italian architect who designed Mr. Ben Chorin's house, said, ''I advise my Italian clients to put them in.'' He attributed the trend less to midges than to modernity. ''It's like the locals buying a washing machine, while they used to do their wash at the village tub.''

In France, Mr. Del Vecchio said, a geographical divide exists, so that screens are sometimes found in homes and commercial buildings in the south, though rarely in the north. Even so, he estimates that in Provence, the region of France where screens are most widely used, fewer than one in four homes have them. In Britain, Mr. Hay said, no market studies exist, but he puts the figure at fewer than 5 percent. Most customers are commercial -- hospitals, offices, factories, stores.

American visitors who have spent an evening at a sidewalk cafe in Paris or Rome will have noticed that far less energy is spent swatting bugs than in, say, Boston or Philadelphia. Yet that does not mean Europe does not have its insects.

''In general, there is probably as much diversity in Europe as there is in North America,'' said Michel Martinez, an entomologist at the National Institute for Agricultural Research, in Montpellier, France. Yet while some regions of Europe, like Scandinavia with its many lakes, abound in bugs, others appear to be almost bug-free.

Nevertheless, experts have observed troubling changes in the bug population over all, Mr. Martinez said, as environmental pollution decimates some species while rising temperatures lure tougher mosquitoes and other bugs from northern Africa to Europe's Mediterranean rim. That in turn drives indigenous bugs further north, a development the screen makers can only welcome.

American screen manufacturers have not entered the European market. The American industry, said Linda Costain, the customer service manager at E. J. Kidd & Company, a big regional screen maker in Raleigh, N.C., is largely local because of the difficulty of shipping screens; the thin frames and mesh make them relatively fragile. Would Kidd be interested in Europe? ''I think we would,'' she said, ''if we could figure out a way to get them over there without getting them damaged.''

In part, Europe's familiarity with screens came from American expatriates who, finding none readily available, simply built their own.

When Carol Rose, a clinical psychologist from Paris, installed screens on several windows of her summer home near the Cher River in central France eight or nine years ago, manufactured screens were unheard of, so she made some, first out of nylon mesh and wood. When she found that rodents nibbled through nylon, she switched to wire mesh.

''Probably the main thing is that there just are not that many horrible insects in France,'' she said. ''There's no black flies.'' She installed her screens, she said, to keep out bugs and moths attracted to the light at night; her French neighbors closed their shutters, and swatted.

Some Europeans, particularly in bug-rich rural areas, also resorted to self-help.

Marjan de Leur, a violinist in the Dutch town of Schaijk, said her husband, Jan, a physician, made their screens about 20 years ago to keep out the flies that were then attracted to local pig farms, but not until trying window curtains, hanging beads and other traditional Dutch insect protection devices. ''Now the pig sties have disappeared, but people have ponds in their gardens, so you get mosquitoes,'' she said. ''Screens are common here.''

In the meantime, window screens abound in most building supply yards and new products are continuously casting the bug population on the defensive.

Hermann Niemann, the marketing director at Wenko, a German manufacturer of household gadgets like ironing board covers, said that about 15 years ago Wenko began selling screens that can be installed in windows by using a Velcro-like tape. More recently a flood of similar products has caused prices to plummet to as little as $3.50 to cover a window. Some customers now simply discard the screens in the fall and purchase new ones in the spring, he said.

He said new products included screens with a tight mesh, ''so that it keeps out pollen, for people with asthma or allergies.'' Such screens retail for as much as $33 a window. In Germany, he said, screens are found mainly in moist regions, ''the Rhineland, the Baltic Sea coast, most areas where you tend to have bugs.''

Mr. Del Vecchio said Mariton, which employs about 75 people, began by distributing screens to building contractors, then five years ago started reaching out to homeowners directly through do-it-yourself centers and building-supply stores. In France, barriers remain.

''People say they're inconvenient, that they block the light and block the air,'' he said. Recent French regulations recommend that food stores and businesses handling fresh food install door and window screens, but fall short of requiring it. ''It has not yet had very much of an impact on us,'' he said.

In Scotland, Mr. Hay said a 1994 British law making screens mandatory in food businesses had buoyed Flyscreen UK, which expects revenue this year of about $8 million. ''There's a snowball effect, from the north of Scotland to the south of England,'' he said.

Mr. Hay has added other weapons to his bug-battling arsenal, including the Mosquito Magnet, a device that attracts and destroys insects and is manufactured by the American Biophysics Corporation of East Greenwich, R.I.

But the battle is tough, he said. Building contractors reluctantly make screens a standard feature of new homes, despite their evident need. ''I'd say we have more bugs here in Scotland'' than in the United States, he said.

The midge population along Scotland's west coast, he added by way of illustration, ''has exploded these last few years.''

Photo: A customer scrutinizes a screen in a Paris store. Screens, not in wide use in Europe, are gaining favor. Some Europeans and Americans living abroad, frustrated at the unavailability of screens, are making their own. (Photo by Ed Alcock for The New York Times)